Consumers and purchasers of food and other agricultural products are becoming increasingly concerned about the exact natures of the foods that they are eating and the effect of agricultural practices on the environment. The public is directing the government to establish and enforce increasingly stringent regulations on the practices of farmers, ranchers, and food processors. Independent certification organizations with progressive agendas for environmental stewardship are gaining significant momentum and influence in the marketplace. The predominance of agriculture as the primary cause of surface water pollution in the United States is fueling the concerns of the voting public and consumers in general about the good environmental stewardship aspects and obligations of agricultural operations. The contribution of pollution to rivers, lakes and estuaries by agricultural operations, via the generation and/or introduction into the environment of pesticides, nutrients, siltation, pathogens and organic enrichment, is becoming more evident in the public and commercial discourse.
The work of M. Tetrault and D. Grandbois, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,885,461, issued 23 Mar. 1997, “Process and system for treatment of pig and swine manure for environmental enhancement”, is an example of inventive efforts to reduce the environmental impact of agricultural operations. Tetrault and Grandbois developed a protocol to remove water and sludge from animal waste of such a composition that the water and the sludge may be safely returned to the external environment and thus reduce pollution of animal manure, both liquid and solid, as generated by domestic animal farms. The efforts disclosed by Tetrault and Grandbois are biological and chemical in concept and in application and do not employ the value of information technology to the challenges of reducing pollution generation on farms.
R. Hargrove and C. Zind, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,897,619, issued Apr. 27, 1999, “Farm management system”, present a technique of using an interactive information technology to, quoting here from the Abstract, “acquire, portray, and process field related data to thereby set rates on a field by field basis, verify that each policy complies with company, state, and federal regulations, verify that the configuration of each field allows the field to be insurable, and provide a method to validate claims of crop damage caused by weather.”
Looking in developments outside the scope of agricultural practices, U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,909, issued 7 Dec. 1999, “Methods for establishing certifiable informed consent for a procedure”, A. Rakshit and W. Judd, reports in the Abstract that, “a method for establishing certifiable patient informed consent for a medical procedure, where, in one embodiment, the patient interacts with a video training system until mastery of all required information is successfully achieved. Training techniques which permit elicitation of measurable behaviors from a patient as a guide to discerning the level of knowledge of the patient are utilized. Certification is only granted when the measurable behavior approximately coincide with the legal and medical standards for establishing informed consent.” Rakshit and Judd thereby use an information technology system to correlate a statistical probability of subjective understanding of a respondent in a particular instant with the behavior of this sole respondent and upon the bases of earlier comprehensive studies of the association of numerous respondents' behaviors with their contemporaneous levels of understanding.
Conventional approaches have attempted to thoughtfully empower agricultural process managers with tools and techniques efficiently and effectively to address the concerns of consumers, certifying bodies and governmental agencies. The existing suites of environmental certification standards (e.g., Federal and State organic food laws and non-governmental eco-label certification programs) neither require nor prescribe real-time certified monitoring of agricultural production practices. There presently exists a mismatch between the methods and tools of prior art data collection, as well as conventional automated analysis systems, and the informational needs and demands of the agricultural process manager, public and regulatory and certifying agencies, agricultural product processing, transportation and distribution agents, and consumers. In addition, there is a rapidly increasing concern on the part of the public and dedicated environmental organizations about the over use of pesticides and any resulting degradation of the environment by agricultural operations.
Much of the raw data required by an agricultural manager to make critical decisions is obtained in the field. In particular, agricultural managers spend significant portions of their budgets on pesticide acquisition and application. Decisions made in pesticide use are largely based upon field data describing pest population detection and counts, and this data is managed outside of any formal reporting and documenting structure.
The external pressures upon agricultural managers to justify pesticide use and to document the integrity of their pesticide decision-making is rapidly growing. Most agricultural managers are as concerned about the environment as other citizens, and actively seek to improve the quality of their decision-making and to demonstrate their sincerity to the public.